Soft piano music flows from the room. The gentle sounds are so at odds with the surroundings that I wonder if this isn’t a dream—a long, bad dream in which I’m waiting for my father outside school and he never turns up because he’s dead. I stop and close my eyes. That’s how you wake up: by screwing up your eyes in your dream. When this has no effect, I raise my hands. Stare at your hands while dreaming and you’ll wake up. Still nothing changes. This must be reality. When I lower my hands again, the corridor is empty. There’s only me, the music, and the half-open door.

Then three things happen all at once. I notice that although I’ve felt cold for the past two weeks, suddenly I don’t—the music is like a mild breeze, thawing my bones. Also, the lights flicker. And time starts to thin. I get the feeling that a single tiny movement would be enough to change my life forever. I reach the end of the corridor and, with it, the end of my old life.

I’m going to walk back, get into the lift, and take it down to the second floor. Exactly. That’s exactly what I’m going to do. But no, I don’t do any of those things. I stay where I am and a feeling takes shape inside me that I’m about to find something I didn’t expect to find.

Instead of going back to the lift, I watch my hand, as if of its own volition, take hold of the door handle and push the last door in the corridor a little farther open.

A low white bookshelf with a blue teapot full of red tulips on top of it. Curtains by the window. Paintings and photos on the walls—landscapes, faces, mountains from above, and underwater scenes. And on the very edge of the bed, her legs covered by an ankle-length nightie, sits a blond girl surrounded by music. The girl looks straight at me. She doesn’t blink. She simply stares at me, and I completely forget not to meet her eye.

Standing in front of her, with her back to me, is a small woman with curly red hair in a nurse’s uniform. She’s combing the girl’s hair. “. . . and in the evening, when drops of dew cling to the tips of the blades of grass, my two little tubby tots emerge from their sofa cave and lick the grass, and their catlike eyes watch the stars breathing.”